Embroid­ery, it turns out, is a bit addict­ive. Some­thing both fun and cre­at­ive you can do whilst watch­ing the tele­visual cel­eb­ra­tion of bonker­ness, Euro­vi­sion? Yes please.

The idea of work­ing from a pat­tern seems a bit dull to me, not to men­tion ever-so-slightly scary, so I’m impro­vising with free­form, seat-of-your-pants stitch­ing. This bird is a reg­u­lar doodle of mine, roughly drawn onto some cot­ton with a fab­ric pen­cil and then even more roughly drawn in with thread and fab­ric scraps from EL Quilto (which is slowly get­ting there..!)

Once bird was done, I moved onto my next plan, which was a rain­cloud. Roughly inspired by a col­lo­graph I made at Edin­burgh Print­makers, this was going to be a happy rain­cloud, but I guess he (or I) just got a bit over­tired dur­ing the stitching.

For some reason, I only seem able to embroider at week­ends, but i’m hop­ing that might start to change as I draw some stronger divid­ing lines between work and play. I’ve grabbed a place at Edin­burgh Screen­works for June and July, with a view to extend­ing into forever, depend­ing on how it works out. It’s still an excit­ing nov­elty to set out for work in the, well, after­noon — we’ll see how long that lasts!